Wii U Forum

Nintendo has a wealth of content to provide digitally, with the astonishing amount of titles it's released ofer the last 30 years, ranging from epic, to masterpiece, to simply flawless. There are plenty plenty of stinkers, of course, but when thousands of titles are released over 3 decades, they can't all be good.

But my question is, do they ever release how good virtual console titles sell? Lets say a game sold 30 million in the past, i wonder if a digital rerelease had a chance of selling, say 5-10 million between nostalgia seekers, retro hipsters, and new kids wanting to try the games their bigger brothers and sisters always talk about being better than the ones they get now.

With no physical media, it's essentially all profit, and with previous sales to go by, there's not much risk as they already know whoch are worth their time to put out.

Is this thread pointless? Yep, as all hell. But I'm bored and let's have some fun. We are talking about GAMES, after all.

This topic is a bit thin and should maybe be moved to the Wii U VC section. With that said there's a reasonably easy way to do some guesstimates on the sales of these titles. Lets assume for a second that the size of the MiiVerse communities are an ok measure of how well a game has done.

Pikmin 3: Sold 420k, has 35k people on MiiVerse
Lego City Undercover: Sold 470k, has 44k on MiiVerse
Assassin's Creed 3: Sold 170k, has 39k on MiiVerse
Skylanders Giants: Sold 150k, has 13k on MiiVerse
Injustice: Sold 50k, has 12k on MiiVerse

You can plot that and there's somewhat of a correlation between a two which you could use to guestimate the sales of some VC games. It's just a guestimate but still, interesting regardless. When you do that you get this:

The 7th gen ports didn't even need to sell that well, either. I know for a fact Ubisoft paid at most $2 million to port Assassin's Creed III.

If they sold 170,000 copies at $40 a piece, that totals out to around $6.8 million just on the Wii U, but that's not taking marketing into account.
It's basically confirmed that every company made profit off of every single one of their Wii U titles.

The only game I know that didn't meet expectations was ZombiU, and that's because they need like 4 times as many sales as they have currently, but the game could still sell for years and end up being profitable.

Thread isn't about the sales of major third party releases on the Wii U, it's about the sales of Virtual Console games. I just used the amount of people talking about a few games with known sales on MiiVerse as some kind of guide to how well some of the Virtual Console games are doing. All things considered they're probably doing fairly well.